1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of an apparatus for communicating user related information using a wireless information device. The term ‘wireless information device’ used in this patent specification should be expansively construed to cover any kind of device with one or two way communications capabilities and includes without limitation radio telephones, smart phones, communicators, personal computers, computers and application specific devices. It includes devices able to communicate in any manner over any kind of network, such as GSM or UMTS mobile radio, Bluetooth, Internet etc.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Current generation wired and wireless telephones can indicate to a caller the status of a call recipient in only crude and potentially ambiguous terms: for example, when a caller makes a voice call, he or she might receive one of five different responses: (a) the desired call recipient answers; (b) there is no answer; (c) there is an engaged tone; (d) the call gets put through to a pre-recorded voice mail message or (e) the call gets diverted to someone else. If the intended call recipient does not actually answer the call, then the caller has no idea why the call was not answered: for example, is the intended recipient in fact there but too busy to answer? Could a different number have been dialled to connect successfully?
Conventional so-called ‘Presence’ systems are the subject of considerable interest at present and partly solve the above problems. The intent of Presence systems is to show the status of the prospective call recipient to a calling party—for example, giving information about whether the intended call recipient is busy, in a meeting, contactable on a mobile phone or land line etc. Reference may be made to RFC 2778 ‘A Model for Presence and Instant Messaging’ February 2000, The Internet Society. Prior art Presence systems have not however been extended to cover the idea of the calling party indicating its own status, such as the subject of the intended call or its urgency. Reference may also be made to conventional Instant Messaging (IM) systems, which allow a party able to participate in IM to indicate its status by selecting a pre-defined status flag (e.g. Out to Lunch; On-line etc.) Because these status flags show merely the status of a party, they are aimed at informing a party wishing to message that party whether doing so would be appropriate, and are therefore similar to the conventional telephony Presence systems described above.
Hence, both prior art IM and Presence systems share a presumption that the critical information to convey, prior to the main communication commencing, relates to the status of the entity which is the target of communications (e.g. whether they are reachable and if so how). This is an essentially asymmetric weighting of significance and ignores entirely the possibility that the person seeking to initiate communication (e.g. commence a voice call) can also provide the target (the call recipient) with useful information prior to the main communication commencing.
Caller ID systems partly address this: they enable a called party to see the telephone number of the person calling. Caller ID systems are increasingly popular, since knowing the identity of the caller can be very pertinent to a decision to accept a call or not. Where the called party's device can store a database of numbers, the caller ID information can be matched against database entries, so that the called party's device can display the actual name of the person calling. At the most basic level, mobile telephone users use the caller ID to screen their calls so that, based on a number of factors relating to themselves (i.e. location, current activity etc.), they can look at the caller ID and make a number of assumptions about the identity of the caller and then take a decision regarding answering the call. However, users are increasingly feeling compelled to answer calls simply because they know that the mobile telephone is with them no matter where they are. Users are answering the mobile telephone even when it is not convenient for them. They are now trying to take various steps to control the reactive behaviours implicit with owning a mobile phone, despite the availability of Caller ID. For example:    Some buy two mobile telephones; one is for personal use, the other for work.    Some are insisting that the phone is turned off outside of work hours.    Some simply decide, based on the Caller ID, that if no name is shown with the call—that the call is probably unimportant because they don't recognize the number. Conversely others interpret this same factor as indicating a potential emergency call.
Hence, the inherent limitations of Caller ID seriously restrict its practical utility.
There are many variants to conventional CallerID (e.g. EP 0641141, U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,604, EP 0869688), but all share the same basic approach of providing to the called party information which is essentially persistent (e.g. images of the caller, the caller's web page etc). Reference should however be made to EP 0802661, which shows the idea of a caller inputting call subject information into a landline telephone handset—this information is sent over the landline to the called party where it is displayed on a handset. The system is designed as an enhanced call screening system, in which a called party can decide to answer a call only if the subject information is interesting or important enough.
Through the convergence of communications and computing, a new generation of intelligent communications devices, often referred to as smart phones or communicators, is being brought into being, utilizing operating systems and related applications such as the Symbian OS platform from Symbian Limited of the United Kingdom. Wireless information devices based on the Symbian OS platform offer the promise of being ‘smarter’ than current generation GSM phones in being able to offer multiple advanced, robust client based applications. However, prior to the present invention, even these advanced wireless information devices would have been incapable of providing rich information (a) about the subject of a voice call to a call recipient prior to the voice call being answered and also (b) about the status/mood of the call recipient to the caller prior to the voice call being answered.